Searching for Modernism's Genetic Code: Picasso, Joyce, and Stevens as a
Cultural Configuration

Phoenix-like, the relationship between literature and its contexts has been reborn as
the field of cultural studiesa field which stresses power relationships among genders,
races, and classes. Valuably, new historicism and its child, cultural studies, have been
skeptical of the older historicism's positivistic stories of "A" influencing
"B" and of reductive drawings of the boundaries that divide foreground and
background. While it has sought to see literature as one of many cultural artifacts, the
artifacts usually are seen in terms of socioeconomic production. But the stress on
micropolitical and macropolitical relations should not prevent this welcome return to
mimesis and to historical contexts from attending to other kinds of cultural frames.
Specifically, the return from the formalism of deconstruction to mimesis should be a
catalyst for examining and juxtapositioning figures and movements without regard to simple
patterns of influence. What I am interested in is the process of examination of cultural
figures in configurations that put new light on cultural history. My goal is to isolate
the essential ingredients of modernistic culture, ingredients that spill over the
borderlands between genres and art forms. While we have learned in recent years to be wary
of locating essential or transcendent themes, it is still necessary to understand the
genealogy of modernism and the figures who contributed to the modification of the cultural
genetic codeparticularly since these modifications live with us now in contemporary art.
Specifically, I am going to frame contextually an odd triptychPicasso, Stevens, and Joyce;
as I weave a narrative from particular strands of similarities, I shall inquire into what
cultural forces produced this configuration.1

As the high modernist period, the period between 1890 and 1939, becomes distant, we
need to locate the modernist turn of mind and see what distinguishes its ethos and its
legacy. Modernism bears for the younger generation the same approximate chronological
distance from their lives that the Victorian period does for those of us who were born in
the forties. Modernism provided not merely the texts but the argument for new criticism,
namely that a literary work was a self-contained ontology, and that there was no formal
relationship between the creator and his or her creation. Contrary to what we were taught
a few decades ago, authors' lives play a particularly vital role in the work of major
modernists. Moreover, we now understand that modernism is derived from cultural and
historical events which provide the frame for understanding its development. If ever there
was a period in which authors' self-fashioning in response to a confused and complicated
cultural milieu is a central subject, it is this one. Not only were religious beliefs and
political assumptions called into question by the work of, among others, Darwin and Marx,
but the very notion of what constituted reality was undermined by the discoveries of
modern physics.

I

John Richardson's recent biography (A Life of Picasso, Vol. 1, 1881-1906)the first
volume of a contemplated four-part studyestablishes Picasso's importance to the history of
modernism and his stature as the predominant figure in twentieth-century painting. While
the culture in which any artist creates depends in part upon extant cultural assumptions,
including symbolic structures, Picasso, as much as any artist, contributed originally to
the reservoir of available symbols his successors inherited. In his major works, such as
The Old Guitarist (1903), Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon (1907), The Three Musicians (1921),
The Dance (1925), and # 1 Guernica (1937), he left images for his successors to wrestle
with. These paintings became the texts which more than any other Ïuvre created our
understanding of modern painting and became the standards by which subsequent painters
measured themselves.

James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, Pablo Picassogreat modernist figures: Joyce, perhaps the
best important twentieth-century novelist; Stevens, the American poet who most captured
the American sensibility in the twentieth century; and Picasso, undoubtedly the preeminent
modern painter. They were born within a few years of one anotherStevens in 1879, Picasso
in 1881, Joyce in 1882and were deeply affected by the crisis of belief, the explorations
of modern science and technology, the development of the modern city, and changing
perceptions of reality. More than any other modernists, Picasso, Stevens, and Joyce
invented forms, techniques, and modes of perception that became part of the cultural
genetic code. Yet each of these three figures revitalized the forms in which they worked
and became paradigms for successors.

All three knew that they were auditioning for the role of major artist, the successor
to the giants who preceded them. All three were deeply influenced by the canon that
preceded them, and needed to be understood in terms of the traditions and contexts in
which they wrote and painted. As Eliot wrote in 1919:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his
appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You
cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I
mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism. (Selected Essays,
4)

All three are haunted by personal and cultural memoryfor Joyce, the Irish experience;
for Stevens, the democratic and transcendental traditions of the American mind; for
Picasso, the Andalusian, Catalan, and Castillian traditions fertilized by the world of
Paris. In the work of all three, the deadparticularly dead artistslive as if they were
alive, and all threeunbelievers in Godare haunted by the spectre of their own death. (We
need to maintain a healthy skepticism about Stevens's alleged conversion to Catholicism on
his deathbed.)

Just as Joyce saw himself as the successor to Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, so
Stevens saw himself as the heir to Emerson and the English romantics. Picasso, Joyce, and
Stevens are in a continuing dialogue with the past from which they take much of their
meaning. They are consciously creating a modern tradition by reinterpreting the tradition
which precedes them. For example, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon comments on El Greco's
Apocalyptic Vision and Cezanne's Bathers as surely as Ulysses comments on The Odyssey and
other prior works, and as Stevens comments on Emerson, Whitman, Keats, and Shelley.
Picasso, Joyce, and Stevens sought archetypes as the common denominators of human
experience. They wished to create modern symbols. They sought to create imagined worlds
that would reinvigorate the nominalism of modern experience and enrich the day-to-day
tedium of what Stevens calls in "The Man whose Pharynx was Bad," "the
malady of the quotidian." Each wished to balance romanticism with classicism.

The very process of role-playingexperimenting with diverse styles, while rapidly
changing voiceswas an essential part of modernism. Role playing is crucial to all three of
these towering modernist figures. In a world where a systematic world view is impossible,
inclusiveness of possibilityof multiple ways of seeingis an aesthetic and a value. Isn't
the essence of cubism the insistence that we need not restrict perspective and that
reality depends on the angle of vision? Borrowing from astronomy, Joyce used the concept
of parallax in Ulysses. Thus in Les Demoiselles d' Avignon, the frontmost naked figure, a
whore, is looking forward and backward and has the body of a female; her African mask with
its wild libidinous energy mocks the restrained and repressed world of conventions and
commerce. But her head also suggests a male artist looking outward to the audience and
inviting the audience to see the still life of fruit in the foreground which he is
exhibiting for a commercial audience to whom he is desperate to sell pictures. The
position of the modern artist who lacks patrons and wealth (including himself), Picasso
implies, is not so different from the way the whores are offering themselves to him and
other clients; indeed, perhaps the distorted facial expression owes something to the male
client's embarrassment for being perceived among whores and to Picasso's discomfort with
the role of the artist as whore.

Picasso, Stevens, and Joyce all knew how the specific underlies the universal; each had
a remarkable eye for detail. What John Richardson writes of Picasso is true of Stevens and
Joyce: "[H]e had learned how to exploit his inherent gifts for caricatures in depth
as a means of dramatizing psychological as well as physiognomical traits" (185). Each
of our three figures combines in his work, "sacred and profane, demonic and angelic,
mystic and matter-of-fact" (270). Each employs an element of magical realism to
intensify and give mysteryand comedyto the world he observes. Painting on his Barcelona
studio wall "the half-naked body of a moor with an erection, suspended from a
tree," Picasso anticipates Joyce's morbid yet hilarious equation of orgasm and death
in "Cyclops" when the alleged perpetrator has an erection as a result of being
hung before his trial (John Richardson 287).

Picasso thought of his works as a diary, and the history of his art as his
autobiography: "My work is like a diary . . . It's even dated like a diary"
(John Richardson 3). Picasso's work is deeply and profoundly autobiographical. For
Picasso, like Joyceto quote what Stephen Dedalus said about Shakespeare as the
prototypical man of genius"found in the world without as actual what was in his world
within as possible" (Ulysses 175: IX. 1041-42). He used his paintings not simply to
reflect his feelings but to create his identity. Picasso's art was exorcism of his
feelings, but is that not equally true of Joyce and Stevens? Picasso, we are told,
"said that his sculptures were vials filled with his own blood" (John Richardson
461), yet when he depicted himself in self-portraits, he wanted to move beyond the lyrical
to the dramatic and epicalas Joyce did in Ulyssesand see himself as other.2 For example,
in the famous 1906 Self-Portrait, which was indebted to Manet's Portrait of a Man (1860),
"he also switched his gaze away from the beholder, to demonstrate that this is no
mirror image, but a detached view of himself" (John Richardson 472). For Picasso, the
artist's creative imagination has the power to recast the world, but he does not ignore
the world beyond imagination.

In The Necessary Angel, Wallace Stevens wrote, "It is said of a man that his work
is autobiographical in spite of every subterfuge. It cannot be otherwise" (121). Yet
the coherent self of a major artist is a myriad of selves, roles, voices, and positions.
Richardson shows how deeply personal and autobiographical Picasso's work is. He stresses
not only the importance of Picasso's self-portraits, but interprets many of the
masterworks from, among others, an autobiographical perspective. Beginning with tracing
Picasso's Andalusian roots, Richardson shows us the folly of separating an artist's life
from his work, and shows that the dialogue between the individual experience and the
cultural experience is necessary to answer questions about an artist's themes and styles.

Picasso found his metaphors in biography. Thus in The Poet Sabartès (1901), he is
recalling Carles Casagemas, a friend who had recently committed suicide; by envisioning
Sabartès's likeness to Casagemas, a not very promising poet, Picasso is using the
technique of summoning something absent for means of comparison, as Joyce did with The
Odyssey in Ulysses, and as Stevens did in his great 1921 lyric sequence, "The Man
whose Pharynx was Bad," "The Snow Man," and "Tea at the Palaz of
Hoon," in which he refers to Shakespeare's 73rd sonnet, "That time of year thou
mayest in me behold," and Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." In his three
1901 Self-Portraits, we see Picasso testing different versions of himself. In the first,
he is the cocky solipsist of "Hoon," full of bravura, staring boldly at the
audience, daring his audience to challenge his charisma. In the second, he stands
pensively in black gloom, as if a victim of circumstances. We think of the poet who felt
the shadow of time and death in "The Man whose Pharynx was Bad." In the third
self-portrait, we see the chameleonic figurethe figure of negative capability in the guise
of an El Greco masque; the artist shows how he can become the figure of capable
imagination who, as Stevens put it in "The Snow Man," "beholds / Nothing
that is not there and the nothing that is" (Collected Poems 9). A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, Joyce uses Stephen as a thinly disguised version of himself, and in
Ulysses he creates another versionthe humane other he sought to becomein the form of the
unappreciated Jewish exile, Bloom, who lives in the here and now (Aristotle's
"ineluctable modality of the visible"), and who increasingly displaces
Stephennow perceived as an intransigent Platonist and a jejune aestheteas the center of
his attention.

Each artist was fascinated by the role of mirrors and glass, not surprising for writers
who could say, as Stevens put it in "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" (1921), "I
was the world in which I walked." While Picasso is known for his compelling and
revealing Self-Portraits, Joyce and Stevens uniquely write about their psyche and
imaginative life in their self-portraits. In a crucial scene in Ulysses, Stephen and Bloom
look into the mirror and see together an image of Shakespearean image of him as a comic
figure wearing a "reindeer antlered hatrack" to signify his being cuckolded.
Among other things, it is a time when in Ulysses diachronic metaphoricity and synchronic
metonymy are interchangeable. For even as Stephen and Bloom take their identity from the
past, they also take it from each other. In "Asides on the Oboe," Stevens
describes Major Man as a "mirror with a voice, the man of glass,/ Who in a million
diamonds sums us up"a man who presumably looks into his own glass to discover his
capacity for responding to feelings and images in the external world: "There was
nothing he did not suffer, no; nor we." The artist's soul is more encompassing and
capable of greater feeling; so, too, are his creations.

Stevens was fascinated, knowledgeable, and deeply influenced by modern painting, and by
Picasso in particular. For Stevens, Picasso was the very model of the modern artist. In
"The Man with the Blue Guitar," Stevens wrestles with Picasso's paintingsnot
merely The Old Guitarist, but The Three Musicians, The Dance, and a number of the major
paintings and collages of guitarsas he uses the speaker to define his aesthetic. Like
Joyce and Picasso, Stevens, too employs multiple points of view not only from poem to poem
but within his major works, such as "The Man with the Blue Guitar" and Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction. Stevens owned a copy of Ulysses and in his 1936 lecture,
"The Irrational Element in Poetry," referred to Joyce as one of those who
explored the unconscious.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon established Picasso as the most innovative painter of his era
and opened the door to cubism. Stevens was fascinated with Picasso; for him, he was not
only the towering figure of modern painting but the archetype of the kind of stature and
recognition as the preeminent artist in his medium that Stevens craved. As I argue in my
forthcoming Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (London:
Macmillan), he played a pivotal role in Stevens's shaping of his conception of the artist
and provided sources for "The Man with the Blue Guitar" not only in The Old
Guitarist of the blue period, but in The Three Musicians, The Dance, and several other
paintings.

If Stevens's "The Man with the Blue Guitar" is a reference to The Old
Guitarist of the blue period, it is an ironic, subtle one, for the passionate singer of
Stevens's poem is not the blind and probably deaf figure of Picasso's blue period. He is
not lifeless or sentimental, self-pitying and deflated; if the guitarist has his blue
melancholy mood, Stevens's guitarist finally triumphs over it. He is not in need of pity
or charity. He is full of himself, has a period of depression and recovers, but never
loses the high spirits of his song. He is proactive not reactive. Stevens's speaker is a
man of indomitable will, the painter rather than the subject. Where, in Stevens's speaker,
is the old guitarist's image of "old age, destitution, and blindness" that John
Richardson ascribes to that painting (277)? No, the man with the blue guitar is more like
the Picasso who created the old guitarist, the artist who, as Joyce puts it in the
"Scylla and Charybdis" section of Ulysses, pours the "allinall" in his
vision, the figure for whom, in Stephen Dedalus's words, his errors are volitional and the
portals of discovery (Ulysses 156; IX 228-229).

II

Let me begin this section with the "Ithaca" section of Ulysses. In a curious
passage illustrating the "irreparability of the past," the narrator comments:

[O]nce at a performance of Albert Hengler's circus in the Rotunda, Rutland square,
Dublin, an intuitive particoloured clown in quest of paternity had penetrated from the
ring to a place in the auditorium where Bloom, solitary, was seated and had publicly
declared to an exhilarated audience that he (Bloom) was his (the clown's) papa. The
imprevidibility of the future: once in the summer of 1898 he (Bloom) had marked a florin
(2/-) with three notches on the milled edge and tendered it in payment of an account due
to and received by J. and T. Davy, family grocers, 1 Charlemont Mall, Grand Canal, for
circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible, circuitous or direct, return.
(571; xvii. 975-84)

I want to take the above passage as a point of departure for examining parallels among
Joyce, Stevens, and Picasso. In a sense, each of these figures conceived the artist as a
clown, but more than that, they each understood the issue of paternity in terms of a
post-Christian world where God the Father was no longer a working myth.

In the farcical versions of search in Ulysses, the clown is a metonym for Stephen
Dedalus's search for a father, and for Bloom's search for a son. He is the anonymous,
androgynous, marginalized outsider charged with amusing the bourgeois. All of usor at
least all malesJoyce is suggesting, are fathers and sons of clowns. The clown's quest for
a surrogate approving father and for an audience is appropriate to Picasso, Stevens, and
Joyce. And where is this quest for a father carried on? Isn't it in the circus of the
modern citywhich is so often the subject of our three writers? Thus, writing of one of the
great triumphs of the rose period, The Saltimbanques (1905), John Richardson remarks:
"Like Manet [in The Old Musician], Picasso has appropriated Baudelaire's metaphor of
vagabonds as artists; and he has set his wanderers in a metaphysical wasteland, where they
confront each other, not to speak of ourselves, with the coolness that Manet (primed by
Baudelaire) used to such telling effect" (385).

The above passage from "Ithaca" points to the modern novel's awareness of
popular culture and its function as a source of metaphors in a world where, as Stevens
puts it, the gods have disappeared (Opus Posthumous 260). The intuitive particoloured
clown in the human comedy is Joyce, who is, in fact, the father of Bloom and the
grandfather of the clown and who can be, like Shakespeare in Stephen Dedalus's monologue
in "Scylla and Charybdis," the father of his own grandfather. The clown is also
Picasso and Stevens, the artist as wanderer, as outsider, as performer, as confidence man,
as flaneur. Picasso depicted clowns to mock traditional bourgeois complacency; clowns were
for him figures who mocked pretension and hypocrisy even while suffering within; they were
marginal figureslike circus performers or figures in arcadesliving by their wits. The
title figure in "The Man with the Blue Guitar" is a version of the popular
performer as troubadour and picaro. Are we not, Stevens implies, all picaros in a system
which lacks a supreme fiction?

All three artist found high culture stultifying and turned for inspiration and
stimulation both to the middle class of the impersonal and indifferent urban culture and
to the classless culture of music halls, circuses, and street and arcade performers.
Picasso and Joyce populated their worlds with the tumultuous, sensuous, and sometimes
bawdy life of the modern city. While Picasso sought the society of cafZs and brothels in
Paris, Joyce knew the life of music halls (we might think of figures such as Tom Rochford
and Maria Kendall in "Wandering Rocks"), brothels, and the barsfrom which women
were excludedin Dublin and cafZs in Paris. While Stevens as an insurance company lawyer
and executive sought refuge in the comforts of upper middle-class and socially elite life,
he often held himself aloof from this life and kept ties both to the socially elite and to
artistic, bohemian communities. He was a member of the group of artists known as the
"Others," whose hero was Marcel Duchamp; Duchamp focused on eros as the way
humans felt oneness with the universe.

Circus performer, entertainers, and clowns depend finally on the economic support of
those they satirize and set themselves apart from. And there is always the possibility
that finally the joke is on oneself and no one hears. The clown is a solitary. And what is
the clown's quest; isn't the clown every man and every woman with a painted face? Isn't
Bloom a clown to those in Dublin who do not recognize his quality? The second sentence in
the above passage is about the serendipitous nature of reality; the image is of a coin
marked by Bloom, but a coin that never returns.

We think, too, of Stevens's use of the speaker as harlequin, as mocker, and as picaro.
The clown suggests the Chaplinesque figure in pantaloons in Notes and the man on the dump
in the poem of that name; both figures are derived from the dispossessed and hobo of the
depression. In Stevens's Harmonium (1923), which owes its title to an instrument
particular to American middle-class culture, churches, and music halls, are not both
Berserk and the prince of peacocks in "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks"
(1923)as well as the speaker in "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman"versions of
clowns? Isn't the speaker of "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks" a clown in
motley, a figure dressed as the prince of peacocks when he meets a figure dressed as
Berserk? The capable man in "Mrs. Alfred Uruguay" (1940) is a man of cap and
bells, an image of the traditional jestera version of Stevens's poet as clowneven as he is
the heroic figure who creates in his mind the ultimate elegance. As in Picasso, the clown
in Stevens is often not only a harlequin and picaro, but an androgynous figure as well:
"For all their coarseness [clowns] struck Picasso as true artists, like himself:
wanderers who led an picturesquely marginal existence when they were not, like him,
performing feats of prodigious skill" (John Richardson 371). Like them, he felt he
was performing for an audience that saw only the mask of an artist and did not wish to and
could not understand the man within. Because of this, he sought refuge in secret codes to
convey his feelings even while publicly performing a painting for prospective buyers.

At times, Joyce, Stevens, and Picasso sought masques to hide their real feelings, and
Picasso and Stevens were drawn to the masques of the commedia dell'Arte. In Stevens's The
Man with the Blue Guitar, the poet is a figure from commedia dell'Artea clown and juggler,
a circus performer and a picaro; dressed in motley, playing a blue guitar, he flouts
standards and mocks his audience and subject. Borrowing from the commedia dell'Arte,
Stevens mocks the nose, the most prominent part of the masque, which was often a metonym
for penis. In Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Stevens's poet is a solitary figure, a
rabbi, "walking by himself," who is seen as a vagabond, a Chaplinesque figure,
namely "the man / In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons"; "A bench was
his catalepsy, Theatre / Of Trope. He sat in the park" (I, x; II, x).

III.

Part of the genetic code of modernism is the spectre of the modern city, oedipal image
of hope and rescue, but also anonymous, indifferent, paternal juggernaut. For each artist
the city had to be naturalized, domesticated, brought into the ken of understanding. For
all three artists, Paris was the libidinous, bohemian, anarchial Other. Abroadand
specifically Parisfor Joyce and Picasso was voluntary exile to a place where intellectual
excitement, personal freedom, and artistic innovation could be found. It is perhaps easier
to see some parallels between the Andalusian painter who thought of himself as a Catalan
and lived in exile in Paris and the Irish writer who disdained Irish glorification of
Celtic culture and language and thought of himself as a European novelist living and
writing in Paris. Indeed, did not Picasso live in the Paris that Joyce first visited in
1902-3 and to which he alludes in Ulysses? The thinly disguised Joyce figure, Stephen
Dedalus of Ulysses was visiting the same sordid neighborhood where Picasso lived. In the
sections of Ulysses, Dublin is Paris mediated. Within Ulysses, specifically in the
"Proteus" section, Stephen thinks frequently of his Paris experiences; they
inform Joyce's rendering of Stephen's and Bloom's fantasies in "Circe." Isn't
the vision in "Circe" of sexual experimentation and outrageous behavior in Bella
Cohen's whorehouseJoyce's version of Les Demoiselles d'Avignonoverlaid with his Parisian
memories? "Wandering Rocks" is the arcade of Dublin, but its book stalls and
eccentricities derive as much from Joyce's memory of Paris as of Dublin. Even if Joyce
never met him, was not Picasso a gigantic figure in the 1920-22 Paris where Joyce finished
Ulysses?

But what about Stevens who lived abroad only in his imagination and for whom abroad was
of necessity a state of mind, inculcated from his reading, from the European influence of
the 1913 Armory Show, and from a lifetime of seeing artistic exhibits and reading French
literature and literary journals as well as from his foreign correspondence? Although
maintaining a strong interest in French culture, corresponding widely beyond the United
States, and thinking of himself as a cosmopolitan figure, he never visited Europe. Wallace
Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, from German-Dutch stock and lived as a
prosperous New England insurance executive. Joan Richardson reminds us that in 1912-1913,
"It was as though Paris had come to New York" (The Early Years 412). For
Stevens, Key West was his Paris, a city which for him had associations of artistic and
sexual experimentation and bohemian behavior. Although the landscape of Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction is a kind of cinematic montage of a dreamscape, it is fitfully anchored in
Paris. Doesn't the ephebe have to overcome the "celestial ennui" of Parisian
apartments? Does Stevens not speak directly to the ephebe of his habitat which gives him a
view from "your attic window,/ Your mansard with a rented piano" (I,v)? But
Stevens is ironic to the cosmopolitan and to the erudition of the city, which are
contrasted with his epiphanic immersion in the natural cycle of the here and now at the
poem's climax: "[T]hey will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne" (III, x).
He addresses the reader as "monsieur and comrade"not without a hint of
admonition, if not iconoclastic disdain, that links him (especially if the reader will not
heed the lessons of the prior stanzas) with the ephebe in the epigraph.

Let us continue with the parallels among Picasso, Joyce, and Stevens. In their early
lives, Joyce, Stevens, and Picasso were all educated in varieties of an ascetic tradition:
Joyceand, yes, Picasso, tooin the Catholic tradition which saw this world as a prelude to
a better one, and understood death as the birth of the eternal soul or as eternal
damnation. Stevens's Pennsylvania Dutch Protestantism saw this world as an individual
moral test of worthiness for the next. Each was educated in something of a Platonic
traditionJoyce in parochial schools and at University College in Dublin; Stevens at
Harvard under Santayana; and, as John Richardson carefully shows us, Picasso, under the
influence of his father, on a diet of paradigmatic classical Spanish
paintersVelzquez, Murill, and Goyaeven while admiring the figure who was being
rehabilitated into the Spanish canon, El Greco.

Before fully encountering the Aristotelian "ineluctable modality of the
visible"what Stephen in Ulysses calls "what you damn well have to see"each
figure flirted with aestheticism, androgyny, escapism, exoticism. These temptations
conflicted with their desire to encounter reality. Picasso, Joyce, and Stevens were
overtly attracted to aestheticism; the work of each of them was for a time shadowed by
symbolism. All three were touched by the symbolist movement in art which embodied codes to
unlock reality and depended upon a hermetic system of correspondence between self and the
universe and/or nature. The Stevens of Harmonium, and, in particular, of the early poems
in that volume such as "Domination of Black" and "Sunday Morning," was
strongly influenced by the aesthetic movement. Like Picasso and Joyce, Stevens was
attracted by the concept of pure art but later sought "to get to the center . . . to
share the common life" (#327, #397). Like Joyce, Stevens used the Eucharistthe
transformation of blood into wineas an image of the word into the world and of the world
into word. "After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which
takes its place in life's redemption" (Opus Posthumous 185). Like Picasso and Joyce,
Stevens saw the artist as God creating a Genesis, a new ontologyand sometimes as a victim,
as Christ crucified.

That Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic and decadent movement influenced all three shows
their common cultural heritage. As John Richardson has shown, Picasso knew Wilde's work as
well as Beardsley's The Yellow Book. Picasso was deeply influenced by the decadent
movement from Apollinaire to Jarry. In different ways, all three of our figures were
influenced by Gertrude Stein. In Joyce's A Portrait, we see a strong influence of Wilde's
art for art's sake and the religion of art. Such a stance puts the artist in the position
of observer and voyeur, someone who is like God paring his fingernails. But all three turn
their backs onor at least modifythe aesthetic tradition in their later years. Joyce
discovered a political voice in Ulysses and Picasso did in Guernica. Stevens found a
kinship with Whitman and Emerson and also with the democratic tradition in America. In
"The Man with the Blue Guitar," he wrote, "I am a native in this world /
And think in it as a native thinks." In the later lyrics such as "Not Ideas
About the Thing but the Thing Itself," he emphasizes the need to communicate with the
audience and to move beyond abstruse poetry.

Each of these artists struggled with his father and reinvented his father by
discovering artistic patrimony. As a very young man, Picasso was said to have remarked,
"In art one must kill one's own father" (John Richardson 95). Each had father
figures whose personality, character, and value systems were deeply troubling. Each needed
to surpass a father who was perceived as either weak or ineffectual or wrongheaded. Each
sought father figures in male friends. Joyce's father was a heavy drinker who had let his
family's fortune slip away and who, in Joyce's mind, was responsible for the illness and
death of his beloved mother; Picasso's father had artistic pretensions that far surpassed
his ability; and Stevens's father was a strong puritanical presence who insisted that his
son pursue a practical career, even while writing to him, "Paint truth but not always
in drab clothes" (Joan Richardson, The Early Years 49). Finally, each endured and was
haunted by the loss of a younger sibling: Joyce's brother George died at fourteen when he
was twenty, Picasso lost his sister Conchita when she was eight and he was thirteen, and
Stevens's sister Mary Katherine died in 1919 when she was in her mid-twenties.

All three had to function as economic men in a bourgeois society, had to market their
work and become something of a flaneur to sell in the arcade of the bourgeois. Yet Stevens
carved out for himself another life and was part of the world on which he depended, even
while having second artistic self. Each is attracted to the unattractive in life. What
Richardson wrote of Picasso also applies to Stevens and Joyce: "How often he would
echo Goya's dictum, 'Ugliness is beautiful'" (182). For each art was self-expression.
For Picasso, his blue period was the reflection of his feelings at the time. Each felt
that he was ostracized and victimized by an unappreciative public, although Stevens was
characteristically more demure about such feelings. All suffered painful non-recognition
and disappointment and felt despair about whether their talents would get a hearing and
seeing, and that would affect them later.

Picasso said of his own style: "I'm never fixed" (John Richardson 83). He was
always seeking new styles, new visions; what John Richardson wrote about Picasso is as
true of Joyce and Stevens: "[H]e wanted to . . . fantasize and dramatize himself and
manipulate his own identity and appearance . . . . This self-dramatizing, chameleonlike
sense would remain with him all his life" (83). Picasso, Joyce, and Stevens all
focused on perspectivism as central to their technique; indeed, for each the technique for
presenting perspectives often became the subject. Each used multiple and often
contradictory perspectiveswitness not only Picasso's cubism, but Stevens's "Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1917) and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, and
Joyce's Ulysses, which depends on ventriloquy of styles, particularly "Oxen of the
Sun" where Joyce performs an historical anatomy of how the changing of styles is the
changing of perspectives.

IV

Joyce, Picasso, and Stevens all broke up the surface into several planes and destroyed
the distinction between foreground and background; they all decentered the subject and
recontextualized it with odd juxtapositions and unique forms. They all saw human
characters in perspectives which included prior experience and association. Stevens's
poems, like cubist paintings, are a brash attack on traditional ideas of representation.
Like cubist paintings, Stevens's poems focus on local objects which the reader needs to
put together. Like cubist collages, they highlight some details at the expense of others
and often break up a surface into several intersecting planes. Like both cubist paintings
and collages, they depend on (1) playfulness that often begins with the title and
continues throughout in an attitude of vacillating but pervasive irony; (2) on rapid
oscillation between abstraction and nominalistic specificity; (3) on odd juxtapositions of
shapes and colors; and (4) on fragments of vignettes and objects, often displaced from
their historical origins but with a hint of their original context.

The series of stanzas in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is like
pictures at an exhibitionwe might even recall Moussorgsky's musical composition of that
name; it is also like a cubist painting where disparate elements are combined into one
flat surface. In a sense, the poem has a radial centerthe blackbird or the perception of
the blackbirdaround which the concentric circles of impressions revolve. Indeed, are not
the thirteen stanzas like still lifes, a form which minimizes the presence of the human
subject, narrative, and storytelling? As if each stanza were a still life in a room, the
reader stands at the center and chooses which one to observe. At the same time, each
stanza is a cinematic scene progressing to greater if tentative revelation.

Perceiving "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" as a visual entity, we
notice that the imposing empty space on the page calls attention to and provides
demarcation for the dearth of words, almost the way frames define and mark the space
outside and inside paintings. And isn't this part of modernism's genetic code? As we know,
modern art depends less on what is perceived than on how we think about and render what we
perceive. And the same can be said for the perception of art. The modern artist does not
expect a closed hermeneutical circle where he communicates what he has seen to the
perceiver. No, the perceiver must parse together a reading depending on the dialogue
between, on one hand, hints, shards, and clues, and, on the other, his own experience.

In Adagia, Stevens quotes Braque's emphasis on the doing as crucial to art: "Usage
is everything. (Les idZes sont destinZes  etre deformZes  l'usage.
Reconnitre ce fait est une preuve de dZsinteressment [Georges Braque, Verve, No.
2])" (OP 159). According to William Rubin, cubists made "the very process of
image formation virtually the subject of their pictures" (16). From cubism Stevens
derived his sensitivity to light and shade, his experiments with layered textures, his
presentation of images in several pictorial planes, his wit and playfulness, and his
abstractions oddly intermingled with the embrace of daily life. Such poems as "The
Emporer of Ice Cream" and "The Man on the Dump" recall Picasso's and
Braque's passion for the vernacular material, particularly their sensory appreciation of
objects and interaction of the gregarious and classless world of the cafZ. Wasn't
Stevens's idea of Florida, especially Key West, based on experiences and fantasies of this
kind? Wasn't Key West his version of bohemian life in Paris? Poems like "The Snow
Man" and "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" follow the cubist tendency to dissolve
the distinction between figure and ground, and eliminate a single point of perspective,
and also eliminate what Emily Bardace Kies has called "a comprehensible recession in
space" (n.p.). Stevens, like Braque, focuses on the connection between things, the
composition; but like Picasso, he is riveted by the peculiarities of individual things,
the specificity.

Like Picasso, Stevens took odd combinations of man-made and natural forms and fused
them into a homogeneity, but a homogeneity that was tentative and disjunctive. One could
say that The Man with the Blue Guitar and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction are elaborate
collages. Too, Stevens's non-mimetic use of coloras, say, in "Anecdote of the Prince
of Peacocks"recalls the cubists' use of color as "an autonomous sign disengaged
from the morphological depiction of an object" (Rubin 40). Like Picasso, Stevens
liberated color from mimesis and freed color from the boundaries of drawn objects and
denoted space. Stevens followed Braque and Picasso in taking art outside the traditional
mimetic system of representation and making a new system based upon new juxtapositions,
odd assemblies of objects, and discontinuous relations that barely held togethera system
that each perceiver had to resolve into his own hypothesis of unity, an hypothesis always
challenged by the anarchy of disunity. Yet the flight from verisimilitude was accompanied
by a desire to fuse familiar perceptions into odd and striking combinations. Stevens, like
Picasso, depended upon the visible world of immediate experience for his donnZe, but
created a teasing balance between abstraction and representation.

All three artists were fascinated by colors, and were alternately attracted and
repelled by black which they equated with death, evil, nullification, and sexuality.
Picasso wrote, "the only real color is black" (John Richardson 417). For all
three black is the alpha and omega of colors. Stephen and Bloomlike Hamletwear black all
day; "Ithaca" ends in the darkness of Molly's soliloquy; Penelope unweaves by
night what she has woven by day. "Ithaca" ends with the orthographic black dot,
suggesting, among other things, the womb; in some editions of Ulysses, the black dot is
egg shaped. Mourning and death hover over Joyce's work from The Dead to "Hades"
to Finnegans Wake. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" speaks to Stevens's
fascination with death, nullification, mystery, and evil.

V

Such works as Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)particularly
Stephen's voyeuristic fascination with Davin's tale of the Irish woman who invites him in
while her husband is awayPicasso's Saltimbanques, and Stevens's "Anecdote of the
Prince of Peacocks" show how the aesthetic, mystical, naturalistic, and boldly sexual
aspects of modernist art struggle dialogically for space in the same work, and thus speak
to the contradictory impulses with which their creators struggled throughout their lives.
For all three artists, sexuality not only bridges the gap between the aesthetic and
ascetic, between word and world, but is the catalyst for imagined worlds that reflect
reality. As Richardson wrote, "Picasso's blue period subjects could only be conceived
by someone who had been brought up on the agonized martyrs, lachrymose Magdalens and
flagellated Christswaxen faces stained with tears, livid bodies streaked with bloodto be
found in Andalusian churches . . . such as the Piet in Mlaga Cathedral"
(John Richardson 277). Sexual subjects are also a way of offending bourgeois
sensibilities; isn't "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks," among other things, a
poem about the male libido, emphasizing the phallic emblem? In art and in life, when he
found a new woman, Picasso "fantasized he was God creating New Eve" (John
Richardson 445). Joyce and Stevens, too, felt they were Pygmalions to the female Galatea.

Each of our three figures imaged the artist as a god-figure creating and recreating the
universe. Both Stevens and Picasso would understand how, for Joyce, to paraphrase Stephen
in the "Scylla and Charybdis" section of Ulysses, the artist could become the
father of his own grandfather. The very title of Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
pays homage to the concept of Godeven as he declares it a fictionand he speaks in The
Necessary Angel of the work the imagination must do now that the gods have disappeared.
Stevens's subject is what to do in a world of unbelief. In Notes, the poet-speaker is
engaged in a quest for value, for the need to find a surrogate for religion, a working
hypothesis for a world in which, as Conrad puts it, "We live, as we dreamalone."
Further, each of our three artists stresses the relationship between the creative and the
procreative, and uses sexual intercourse as a metaphor for the way the artist's
imagination must have intercourse with the world. It might be said that all three
spiritualized sexuality, made it something of a supreme fiction; we might think of
Stevens's title "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour." Stevens found in the
concept of muse and interior paramour, and in his feminized "fluent mundo" of
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, compensation for what he lacked in a wife, namely a
responsive, empathetic other with whom he could share his imaginative world. Just as
Molly's monologue gathers together and comments upon the women figures who preceded her in
Ulysses (the old milkwoman as "The Old Women of Ireland" who only appears young
to a true believer, Bella Cohen, Gerty McDowell, Martha Clifford, Ms. Douce and Ms.
Kennedy), so does Stevens's "fat lady" do the same for the women in Notes,
including Bawda who marries the great captain on Catawba, Nanzia Nunzio who strips herself
naked before Ozymandias, Canon Aspirin's sister, and the blue lady.

Picasso appropriated what John Richardson calls the "sacred fire" of
Christianity for his art. In The Two Sisters (1902), Picasso drew upon his
"apprenticeship as a devotional painter," "to endow whores with an air of
universal relevance and mystic power" (John Richardson 224). Picasso knew Catalan,
Romanesque, and Gothic art and architecture; he was in Barcelona in 1902 when the great
exhibit of ancient Spanish art opened and knew Spanish religious paintings well. Picasso's
work often retains the trappings and apparatus of religion; as Richardson shows, Picasso's
early treatment of sacred subjects "lingered on in the artist's memory, and
re-emerged in the tear-filled eyes and scream-filled mouths of Guernica, not to speak of
Picasso's harrowing portrayals of his own personal martyrsDora Maar, and his wives, Olga
and Jacqueline" (John Richardson 72).

The metonymical interrelationship among the sexual, religious, and the aesthetic are at
the center of the art of all three figures. Like Joyce with Molly, and Stevens with his
"fat lady"herself a version of the earlier blue lady and an echo of Joyce's
MollyPicasso celebrated experienced, intensely sexual women as Madonnas. Joyce was
fascinated by the systems of religion that he spent his life protesting; does not the very
term epiphany come from the Catholic tradition in which he had been immersed as a child
and adolescent? Isn't A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man about the aestheticizing of
the sacred and of religious tradition? Note the painterly title, playing on Wilde's title
The Picture of Dorian Gray (a book about the corrupting effects of a decadent life and
about the power of art to transcend life in revealing truth). On one hand, Stephen Dedalus
refuses to pray at his mother's funeral; on the other, his frame of reference for
imagining the search for a father takes place in terms of arcane Trinitarian heresies of
Arius and Sabellius. Joyce in his early work created a religion of art to replace the
religion he had left behind.

Each of these male figures uses his art to self-fashion his relationships with women.
For each the aesthetic and the sexual, art and desire, are inextricably linked and that
link derives from the imagination. As John Richardson notes, Picasso "[charges] the
portraits of women in his life with hidden messages and manipulative devices; sometimes
calculated to warn or punish or tease; sometimes to seduce or entrap" (John
Richardson 237). Joyce with Molly and Stevens with his idealized women as muse, in poems
such as "The Idea of Order at Key West" and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, also
use their art to work out issues with the women in their lives. Each has a need for women
both as aestheticized muse and as a sexually accessible object. Yet, by contemporary
standards, perhaps all three male figures are somewhat limited, if not misogynistic, in
their perception of females. At times Picasso, Joyce, and Stevens see women in blatant
sexual roles and do not seem to credit them with powers of intellect equivalent to their
own. And this, too, is something of the legacy of the male genetic code of modernism.

VI

To conclude: in this essay, I am suggesting that cultural criticism need not be
confined only to Marxist perspectives and stories of power relationships. What I am
suggesting is that we might extend cultural criticism beyond ideology and abstractions and
to refocus it in humanistic terms. By imaginatively responding to similarities among
Picasso, Stevens, and Joyce and tracing patterns within their lives and works, we may
create a cultural context that locates the genealogy of modernism, even while that context
transcends geographical boundaries, as well as simplified stories of influence or
hegemony.

Notes

1 At the outset, I want to make clear that this story of male artists is one component
of modernism's genetic code. I have discussed Virginia Woolf's work and importance in my
The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890-1930 (New York: St Martin's P, 1989) and
understand that she could and should be part of a different cultural configuration.

2 "The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied
round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper
and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence
or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence,
impersonalises itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life
purified in and reprojected from the human imagination" (Joyce, Portrait 215).